(On what happened in the final four minutes) “I was proud of our team because of how we scraped and scrapped our way back into it and gave ourselves a chance to win. The frustrating part is, knowing that we came out flat in the first half and dug ourselves such a hole, such a deficit that you do all you can, sometimes you run out of gas in the end when you use that much energy to come back.

(On being surprised the first half was so bad because they’d played better recently) “It caught me off guard, that’s for sure, because we hadn’t seen that from our team. We had seen progress. We had seen more like what we did in the second half. Maybe this year, we make progress, we make progress, we took a step back today in the first half, but again, trying to build on the second half. It wasn’t anything that I thought was going to happen. I thought we’d come out and do a lot better job than we did in the first half.”

(What happened in the first half?) “We were just a step slow in closing out, we were a step slow in keeping them in front of us. They got to the basket on us. Just a few miscues out there that wasn’t the case in the Cal game. We were almost flawless in terms of execution defensively and what we were trying to do for the most part, but that wasn’t the case here today.”

(On Stanford forward Michael Humphrey) “Humphrey is a really good basketball player and sooner or later he was going to do something to impact the game, and obviously he did down the stretch. We were small. He took advantage of his height and he was able to help his team pull it out.”

(On Stanford forwawrd Reid Travis going out of the game with an injury) “With him in the game it’s just very difficult to switch him. you don’t want a smaller guy on him because he will really make you pay for it. There were some things we had to be a lot more conservative with when he was in the game. When he was out of the game, we could get a little more creative.”

(On starting 1-4 and the feeling creeping in that this season is getting away from them) “Before, when we lost our opener to Washington State, that’s when it could have happened. Even though we didn’t fare well last time on our home stand, as well as we’d like to, we are going back home again. But we’re going back home, in my opinion, a different team. I think this team has made progress and now that we go back home, I don’t think that feeling is about to creep in. I think our guys will be resilient, come back and play with a lot of energy in our next game.”

(How do you correct coming out flat?) “I think right now, in all our guys’ minds, it might be corrected already. Our guys, we know what we did. If we could have it back some kind of way, maybe it would be different, our mindset. But our guys know. We obviously will remind them when we’re at practice on Monday, but this group of guys I think will bounce back, because we know what we did here today.”

About Christian Caple

A proud native of Longview, Wash., Christian Caple joins The News Tribune after covering Washington State football and men's basketball for two years at the Spokesman-Review in Spokane (though he lived in Pullman). He is a 2010 graduate of the University of Washington, an avid NWAACC basketball fan, and is unsure how to proceed now that Breaking Bad is over.